Due to frequent use of antibiotics, hospitals and healthcare facilities are at high risk of breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria (superbugs). When a person acquires a Hospital-Acquired Infection (HAI) involving a superbug and their body is incapable of resisting infection on its own, few effective treatments are available. According to the Center for Disease Control, patients in the U.S. contract nearly 2 million HAIs each year that contribute to around 99,000 deaths. The cost to the Healthcare system is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Not every HAI can be effectively treated once contracted; the best cure is prevention before the infection occurs, through effective sanitation of every vector that can transmit infection from one patient to another, permit infection to travel from place to place, or create a conducive environment for live bacteria to persist over time.
One transmission vector generally regarded as high-risk is through physical contact with healthcare professionals. Patients less frequently have physical contact with each other, but healthcare professionals move continually from patient to patient. While healthcare professionals are encouraged to adopt habits of personal hygiene and frequent hand washing, the fabrics of their clothes, being porous and less frequently washed, may be more hospitable environments for germs to travel from patient to patient. Superbugs such as MRSA have been demonstrated to live on articles of clothing for weeks.
In addition to the personal risk to patients and doctors, HAIs also create financial risk for hospitals. Hospitals face increasing levels of liability for the care of patients.
So, for both humanitarian and financial reasons, hospitals have a clear need to reduce the number of HAIs.
Many articles of clothing in hospitals, including scrubs, are either disposable or interchangeable and are cleaned in bulk. But while similar services exist, various factors of inconvenience result in less-frequent cleaning for hospital lab coats, doctor's shoes, and a few other personal medical items such as stethoscopes that remain with one doctor day after day. For this reason, lab coats, shoes, and a few other personal medical items of similar and smaller size may present a heightened risk of causing infection. Setting the risk aside, these items also cause the perception of risk, which may lead to increased anxiety by patients and healthcare professionals.
This invention is designed to deliver additional convenience in disinfecting lab coats, helping healthcare professionals to disinfect their garments, shoes, and personal medical items far more frequently than they have done previously and helping patients and healthcare professionals to feel safer about HAIs.